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Smartphones and beyond - Lessons from the remarkable rise and fall of Symbian

Admittedly being written more for people in the industry than consumers, David Wood's upcoming restrospective on the lessons to be learned from the rise (60% market share) and fall of Symbian still looks interesting for enthusiasts, with all sorts of nuggets of both wisdom and insider knowledge from the last decade. The book's still in progress, but some sections and teasers are already online, see the links below.

David Wood is something of a legend in the Symbian world, having been one of the architects of Symbian's predecessors, Psion's SIBO and then EPOC/32 operating systems, and then being intimately involved with the OS throughout the 2000s. If anyone was going to 'write the book' on Symbian then David's the man.

The upcoming book (which has no publication date as yet, so don't hold your breath) has its own web site here (screencapped above), with links of interest being:

Having read through a number of the chapter intros and also a full review chapter, I can say that this is a fairly definitive insider look at the thinking inside Symbian from the mid 1990s to about 2010. Its core purpose is to draw out lessons that can be learned for current smartphone industry participants, but there's a lot of interesting history along the way.

Peppered with quotes, press release extracts, internal meeting slides, and so on, 'Smartphones and Beyond' isn't a light read, but for anyone who's genuinely interested in what went right and what went wrong inside this industry, David's book is well worth looking out for later in the year.